Belarus

2011

  
Charter 97 Editor-in-Chief Natalya Radina at CPJ's 2011 International Press Freedom Awards. (Muzaffar Suleymanov/CPJ)

Belarusian website Charter 97 attacked, shut down

It’s not unusual for Charter 97, a Belarusian pro-opposition news website, to be disrupted online. CPJ has documented intimidations, threats, and arrests against its staff members, the murder of its founder, and denial-of-service attacks against the website.

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CPJ
CPJ's annual International Press Freedom Awards dinner took place at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. (Michael Nagle/Getty Images for CPJ)

Awardees to their colleagues: Buck the system

The Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria might seem like an odd venue to stage a call for resistance. Nine hundred people in tuxedos and gowns. Champagne and cocktails. Bill Cunningham snapping photos. This combination is generally more likely to coax a boozy nostalgia than foment a revolution. But the journalists honored last night at…

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Plainclothes police arrest a protester in Minsk. (Reuters/Vasily Fedosenko)

A ray of hope for the embattled press in Belarus?

In a rare development, the Belarusian general prosecutor, Grigory Vasilevich, stepped up for journalists and defended their right to report on ongoing political protests. According to a statement issued by his press office on Friday, Vasilevich sent a letter to Interior Minister Anatoly Kuleshov in which he reminded his colleague of journalists’ rights under the…

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(Reuters)

Under house arrest in Belarus for not playing by the rules

It has been four long months since security forces snatched Irina Khalip, at left, from Minsk’s Independence Square while she was reporting on a protest of the flawed December 19 Belarusian presidential vote.While Khalip was giving a live account from the square to the Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy, riot police beat her and forcibly…

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After defying the EU for years, Uzbek President Islam Karimov is welcomed by Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission. (Reuters/Thierry Roge)

EU has contradictory message on Karimov, Lukashenko

Unless European Union officials mean to expose the inconsistency of their own policymaking, they should stand firm by their declared commitment to defend press freedom and human rights in the former Soviet countries. For now, their drastically different approaches to authoritarian leaders in Belarus and Uzbekistan leave one questioning the EU’s strategy. 

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2011